# Quote — Peter Atkins, The Periodic Kingdom

> This is the kingdom of the chemical elements, the substances from which everything tangible is made. It is not an extensive country, for it consists of only a hundred or so regions (as we shall often term the elements), yet it accounts for everything material in our actual world. From the hundred elements that are at the center of our story, all planets, rocks, vegetation, and animals are made. These elements are the basis of the air, the oceans, and the Earth itself. We stand on the elements, we eat the elements, we are the elements. Because our brains are made up of elements, even our opinions are, in a sense, properties of the elements and hence inhabitants of the kingdom.

- Author: [Peter Atkins](https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-atkins.md)
- Book: [The Periodic Kingdom](https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-atkins/the-periodic-kingdom.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Peter_Atkins#Periodic_Kingdom_(1995)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-atkins/the-periodic-kingdom/this-is-the

## More from this book

> The kingdom is not an amorphous jumble of regions, but a closely organized state in which the character of one region is close to that of its neighbor. There are few sharp boundaries. Rather, the landscape is largely characterized by transitions ...

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-atkins/the-periodic-kingdom/the-kingdom-is-not.md)

> I have presented the periodic table as a kind of travel guide to an imaginary country, of which the elements are the various regions. This kingdom has a geography: the elements lie in particular juxtaposition to one another, and they are used to produce goods, much as a prairie produces wheat and a lake produces fish. It also has a history. Indeed, it has three kinds of history: the elements were discovered much as the lands of the world were discovered; the kingdom was mapped, just as the world was mapped, and the relative positions of the elements came to take on a great significance; and the elements have their own cosmic history, which can be traced back to the stars.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-atkins/the-periodic-kingdom/i-have-presented.md)

> It was a great achievement of the early chemists — with the crude experimental techniques available also with the ever-astonishing power of human reason (as potent then as now) — to discover this reduction of the world to its components, the chemical elements. Such reduction does not destroy its charm but adds understanding to sensation, and this understanding only deepens our delight.

p. 147 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-atkins/the-periodic-kingdom/it-was-a-great.md)